In Part I of this paper I presented some of my thoughts about the study of human growth. I should like to restate, in simple outline fashion, the steps in my thinking about the physician's need for a better understanding of growth.
The physician is faced with a person as a patient—an individual human being, not abstract Man.
Any such person is an indivisible biologic unit.
Such a living organism consists of its whole life cycle, from gametes on. That is, the organism is as it is at any age or stage of its development because of what has gone before.
What has gone before includes, first, a unique inheritance from the genes; second, the nongenetic inheritance of cultural habits and codes of behavior, and, third, an individually unique series of interactions between this new developing organism and its environment. John Dewey's term "transactions of living"